"Timothy?"

" Timothy?"




"Okay Tim, I'm off. See you in a bit."

An overdrawn groan was heard, soon followed by heavy footsteps down the stairs of an old house. The dead weight of the eight year old youth caused the wooden planks to cry out in a frightening way.

"I need to get those stairs renewed. Better yet, I need a new house." Corilyne grumbled to herself while glaring at the house that was older than her parents, and they were old people.

"But Mommy, I wanna play in the attic." His soft voice whined.

"You can't, not in the attic; the floor's almost gone up there and the rest of it is going to collapse one day."

"Why couldn't we get a nicer house? You have enough money."

She gasped at her son and stared down at him, offended; she knew what he was implying.

"Timothy Brian, you are in no need of knowing our financial standard, and don't you dare say that. I am your mother. I buy you everything you need; I provide for you, and I work hard to keep you under my wing." With each word that had spit out like acid she walked closer to the boy until he eventually backed up to the wall, not knowing what she would do. Hit him? She has never done that before.
She raised her hand and ran it through her hair, not noticing how her son flinched. "I work hard, and I do what I can. Shut your mouth and wait until I get back. I'll only be thirty minutes. Maybe you could walk down to the playground? I saw some kids there earlier; this could be a great way to make new friends."

He nodded solemnly and walked up the creaky stairs to get his jacket. He enjoyed having a room on the second floor, but did they really have to get a house that could fall apart at any second? That would really ensure his death; it would even look good on the Newspaper headline that his mother always reads for breakfast: 'Death of child, only eight, crushed by the heavy ceiling of an extremely old house'- lovely.

The sound of the front door slamming implied that his mother had left, still aggravated. He wanted nothing to do with those kids; everyone at his old school called him a freak and shoved him into the little cubbies they put their muddy shoes in when it rained. Was there a chance they could be different here?

"I doubt it." He mumbled under his breath, not realizing he spoke aloud. He took his time going to the closet, finding a heavy winter coat and shrugging it on. In the process he had got a dangerous idea. He could get into serious trouble, but who was here to yell at him for it?

He smiled and ran to the stairs opposite of his doorway leading up to the attic. There was a sense of urgency and impatience that erupted in his stomach; however he took caution as he remembered what his mother said about the floor. When he got up to the small dusty room he paused; the space was empty and the air held a certain sense of dread that sent chills down his spine. Out of reflex, he shivered and twitched bringing his squeaky jacket sleeve covered arms up into a hugging position around his slightly pudgy frame. Even at eight, the baby fat did not disappear. Another thing the much thinner kids laughed and teased him about.

There was a scowl on his face when he came back to reality, but it was soon replaced with an excited grin as he took a step forward. However, his foot had barely made contact when the ground shifted and fell apart which almost made him fall.

"Okay, mission abort, maybe scary mean kids aren't so bad." He backtracked down the stairs of both floors and ran out the front door nearly forgetting to close it.

Once outside, he paused to take a couple deep breathes of the muscle tensing air. "Well, already this far now, what direction was the playground?" He looked left and right, spotting nothing. He sighed and decided to rely on hearing. Soon enough he pinpointed the echoing of voices coming from his left and followed.

The voices grew louder the closer he got and he could now see the outline of dark green handlebars covered by bodies of children sitting on top of it. As a third grader, the playground rules were that if you were the first to the handlebars or the slide, you were the leaders, so Timothy was almost mesmerized as each kid was placed on the metal contraption.

Eventually they noticed him standing below them and shared looks to each other before placing their sight on one in particular. He smiled- although it might have been a smirk- and made his way down to the ground.

Timothy began to mutter to himself and nearly stumbled while quickly moving backwards, much like this morning as his mother screamed at him.

"No don't do that, you'll trip and fall!" The black haired kid exclaimed to him, making him pause although his stutter was still evident.
"I- I'm so sorry. I probably interrupted something important to you guys; n-not that you're all guys of course. I can see you have some girls in your group, not that there's anything wrong with that.-" He was cut off by the loud laughter of the fellow youth in front of him.

"You're a funny kid. I'm Kyle. What's your name?" Kyle seemed to be a friendly dude, and he didn't give Tim snarky comments even with his embarrassing speech deficiency.

"I'm Timothy, just moved here a couple days ago."

"Look at that, you can talk!"

"Well it's more so hearing than looking when someone's talking." He quickly bit his tongue and retracted a bit, afraid that Kyle would get angry; instead he heard a chuckle.

"Cool, dude, want to hang with us? There's room on the bars."

Tim smiled and nodded. "Yeah, that'd be cool!" He followed the taller boy over to the ladder and climbed up to the top, safely plopping down on the cold metal. He found himself placed between Kyle and another boy, a little chunkier than him and a good bit shorter.

"So Timmy, you have parents?" An albino girl asked.

"Uh yeah, a mother. You?"

She smiled and shook her head. "Nope, none of us do. Sad, but it's easier this way."

Tim was shocked; he widened his big brown eyes and stared at all of them. "No parents? What do you do?"

A few had grim smiles while a few others chuckled; Kyle was the one to answer.

"We normally stick around here. It's hard but we have our ways of survival. You should join us."

Now he was just confused. "Join you? Wouldn't my mother be alone? She'd be so mad."

The leader laughed. "Don't worry about it. But think of it, is she really a good parent? This is New York, no one's innocent here. There's got to be something about her you absolutely despise."

Timothy knew what the kid said was not true, there had to be some good in people here, but he found himself thinking of this morning. The way his mother yelled at him, almost striking him. He thought back to when he remembered her going out late and coming back thousands of dollars richer. She was an assistant at a popular fashion company; her paycheck was not a heavy one. He has known for a while what she was doing. She would go back and forth from work, performing deviant actions and coming back to him with new accessories. They were rich! Wrong. His mother was rich. He was someone she made sure to spend the least amount of money on. He got necessities, she got wants.

With every passing moment he got angrier and angrier.

"I hate her." He spat out. It was blunt; and it was enough for the others to get the hint. Kyle did his little half smirk again.

"Then join us. You only have to do one thing. Come on Timmy, weâll be best friends. We all will."

Timothy was heartbroken. He was housed with a woman almost like a stranger to him. She gave him life but he was far from living. She gave him a name that was not used; instead he was given a nickname so she did not waste her breath. It was urgent and quick; something to spit out. Kyle gave him a nickname not so he could spend less time recovering seconds he would never get back, but as affection. The whole group must have had nicknames, they were a family. Not only that, they were a family he dreamed of being with.

"I'm in. What do I do?"

________________________________________________________________________

Corilyne came back with a new necklace, shoes and a slimming winter coat. She was happy; her son was in the back of her mind. She had no worries.

That changed quickly.

She approached the door to the house and got out the keys. She almost slid the key into the slot before pausing and grabbing the handle instead. She jiggled the doorknob and sure enough, it opened. Her smile turned into a look of annoyance. "Timothy! You left the door unlocked, we could have been robbed!" She yelled angrily,pausing to wait for the sloppy sound of offbeat running.

Nothing.

"Timothy?" She looked all over the first floor but no sign.

She went upstairs to see if he was asleep in his room. He was not.

"Tim, where are you! I swear if this is a prank-." Her words echoed through the house unfinished. She had caught sight of the hole in the floor above her.

"God, I told him not to go to the attic, that's a big hospital bill. Where is the little bugger?"

She sighed and cursed silently to herself before remembering she had told him to go to the park.

"Oh, Tim you're in so much trouble."

She went out the door and to the left. She could hear the sound of children's laughter and grew more aggravated by each sound.
Her new heels landed on the mulch that covered the playground, causing some to fly up and over to another spot, and looked around. There were no children in sight even though they could still be heard all around her. The air grew tense as she felt multiple pairs of eyes staring her down like prey.

"Hello, mother."

A yelp came out of her mouth before she could bite it back. She turned around so fast she could have sworn she got whiplash. The blurry outline of her son was in front of her and it took a couple moments for her eyes to adjust. By the time they did he was only a couple feet away from her.

Her anger came back to her. "Timothy you are so ground-" She stopped talking as she realized he was covered in a red, sticky substance and smiling.

"Timothy?"

His grin grew wider. "Hello, mother," was repeated in several voices. She looked around and spotted groups of children coming out and from behind many of the life sized activity blocks.

There was no choice for her but to back up, only to bump into something metal.

The monkey bars.

"Don't be scared, mother;" Timothy taunted, "you should be happy. Spending stolen money from your work; that's funny."

The blues of her eyes grew larger as he continued to approach, and she tried to convince herself that it was a plastic knife held tightly in his left hand.

The other children began laughing again. Their sweet, haunting voices drew nightmares from her deepest fears and made her tremble. They spoke out in unison so neatly that it was obvious they had done this more than a few times.

"Don't be scared. Everyone gets what's coming to them in the end. We're just dealing with you first."

The first feeling of pain came from her arm. She cried out; bringing a hand to the wound. What she felt was only more pain. She had grabbed onto torn layers of skin falling off her arm. The sight was horrifying and she had no idea what to do as she saw the reflection of the sun on the blade as it came up again. So she called out to her son.

"Timothy." And she screamed.

The scream was silenced almost as soon as it started. She should never scream. Timmy was just tired of her shrill, scratchy voice. It was annoying.

________________________________________________________________________

Just to the left of the playground was a forest. Dark, deep; many stories were heard of children going into the forest and not coming back out for hours. Sometimes some have even seen those carrying bodies. All they do is go to the playground and do nothing but sit on the monkey bars. The bodies were never seen again. The latest of the bodies was a woman. Her physical attributes were not clear for she was skinned to the near bone. A little later than that, there was a file made up of a missing mother and her son. No one knows where the mother went, but people often saw the child with the other neighborhood kids. Everyone was suspicious of them, but no one wanted to travel through the woods to find out what they were doing. But in the forest was a meadow with one giant tree in the middle. There they would find many skinned bodies hanging from the tree. Some were cut down, leaving a small part of the rope on the tree, and had holes dug into, almost as if they were eaten from. The tree itself was dead, and had the words 'No Rest for the Wicked' carved into the wide trunk.